The Three Brontës E-Book

May Sinclair

• Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

In "The Three Bront√´s," May Sinclair meticulously examines the lives and works of the Bront√´ sisters'—Charlotte, Emily, and Anne'—through a blend of biographical portraiture and literary criticism. Sinclair's writing is notable for its lyrical quality, intricate analyses, and empathetic insight, exploring not just their individual contributions to literature but also the socio-cultural constraints of their time. The book situates the Bront√´s within the broader context of 19th-century literature, illustrating how their distinct voices reflect the tumultuous landscape of gender, class, and creativity in Victorian England. May Sinclair, an influential modernist writer and feminist thinker, brings her rich understanding of literature and the intricacies of female experience to this work. Her own struggles with societal expectations and personal identity undoubtedly fuel her fascination with the Bront√´s' defiance against constrained norms. Sinclair's prior literary engagement with themes of psychological depth and gender dynamics positions her as a fitting interpreter of the Bront√´ legacy, illuminating their pioneering spirits in a male-dominated literary world. Readers seeking an in-depth exploration of one of literature's most remarkable familial legacies will find "The Three Bront√´s" both captivating and enlightening. Sinclair's compelling narrative not only pays homage to these iconic authors but also invites a deeper understanding of their enduring impact on literature and feminism. This book is an essential addition for anyone interested in the intersection of biography and literary analysis. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.

Leseprobe

May Sinclair

The Three Brontës

Published by Good Press, 2022

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EAN 4057664616586

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

THE THREE BRONTËS

APPENDIX I

APPENDIX II

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

Table of Contents

When six months ago Mr. Thomas Seccombe suggested that I should write a short essay on "The Three Brontës" I agreed with some misgiving.

Yet that deed was innocent compared with what I have done now; and, in any case, the series afforded the offender a certain shelter and protection. But to come out like this, into the open, with another Brontë book, seems not only a dangerous, but a futile and a fatuous adventure. All I can say is that I did not mean to do it. I certainly never meant to write so long a book.

It grew, insidiously, out of the little one. Things happened. New criticisms opened up old questions. When I came to look carefully into Mr. Clement Shorter's collection of the Complete Poems of Emily Brontë, I found a mass of material (its existence I, at any rate, had not suspected) that could not be dealt with in the limits of the original essay.

The book is, and can only be, the slightest of all slight appreciations. None the less it has been hard and terrible for me to write it. Not only had I said nearly all that I had to say already, but I was depressed at the very start by that conviction of the absurdity of trying to say anything at all, after all that has been said, about Anne, or Emily, or Charlotte Brontë.

Anne's case, perhaps, was not so difficult. For obvious reasons, Anne Brontë will always be comparatively virgin soil. But it was impossible to write of Charlotte after Mrs. Gaskell; impossible to say more of Emily than Madame Duclaux has said; impossible to add one single little fact to the vast material, so patiently amassed, so admirably arranged by Mr. Clement Shorter. And when it came to appreciation there were Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, Sir William Robertson Nicoll, Mr. Birrell, and Mrs. Humphry Ward, lying along the ground. When it came to eulogy, after Mr. Swinburne's Note on Charlotte Brontë, neither Charlotte nor Emily have any need of praise.

And on Emily Brontë, M. Maeterlinck has spoken the one essential, the one perfect and final and sufficient word. I have "lifted" it unblushingly; for no other word comes near to rendering the unique, the haunting, the indestructible impression that she makes.

So, because all the best things about the Brontës have been said already, I have had to fall back on the humble day-labour of clearing away some of the rubbish that has gathered round them.

Round Charlotte it has gathered to such an extent that it is difficult to see her plainly through the mass of it. Much has been cleared away; much remains. Mrs. Oliphant's dreadful theories are still on record. The excellence of Madame Duclaux's monograph perpetuates her one serious error. Mr. Swinburne's Note immortalizes his. M. Héger was dug up again the other day.

It may be said that I have been calling up ghosts for the mere fun of laying them; and there might be something in it, but that really these ghosts still walk. At any rate many people believe in them, even at this time of day. M. Dimnet believes firmly that poor Mrs. Robinson was in love with Branwell Brontë. Some of us still think that Charlotte was in love with M. Héger. They cannot give him up any more than M. Dimnet can give up Mrs. Robinson.

Such things would be utterly unimportant but that they tend to obscure the essential quality and greatness of Charlotte Brontë's genius. Because of them she has passed for a woman of one experience and of one book. There is still room for a clean sweep of the rubbish that has been shot here.

In all this, controversy was unavoidable, much as I dislike its ungracious and ungraceful air. If I have been inclined to undervalue certain things—"the sojourn in Brussels", for instance—which others have considered of the first importance, it is because I believe that it is always the inner life that counts, and that with the Brontës it supremely counted.

If I have passed over the London period too lightly, it is because I judge it extraneous and external. If I have tried, cruelly, to take from Charlotte the little beige gown that she wore at Mr. Thackeray's dinner-party, it is because her home-made garments seem to suit her better. She is more herself in skirts that have brushed the moors and kept some of the soil of Haworth in their hem.

I may seem to have exaggerated her homesickness for Haworth. It may be said that Haworth was by no means Charlotte's home as it was Emily's. I am aware that there were moments—hours—when she longed to get away from it. I have not forgotten how Mary Taylor found her in such an hour, not long after her return from Brussels, when her very flesh shrank from the thought of her youth gone and "nothing done"; nothing before her but long, empty years in Haworth. The fact remains that she was never happy away from it, and that in Haworth her genius most certainly found itself at home. And this particular tone of misery and unrest disappeared from the moment when her genius declared itself, so that I am inclined to see in it a little personal dissatisfaction, if you will, but chiefly the unspeakable restlessness and misery of power unrecognized and suppressed. "Nothing done!" That was her reiterated cry.

Again, if I have overlooked the complexities of Charlotte's character, it is that the great lines that underlie it may be seen. In my heart I agree with M. Dimnet that the Brontës were not simple. All the same, I think that his admirable portrait of Charlotte is spoiled by his attitude of pity for "la pauvre fille", as he persists in calling her. I think he dwells a shade too much on her small asperities and acidities, and on that "ton de critique mesquine", which he puts down to her provincialism. No doubt there were moments of suffering and of irritation, as well as moments of uncontrollable merriment, when Charlotte lacked urbanity, but M. Dimnet has almost too keen an eye for them.

In making war on theories I cannot hope to escape a countercharge of theorizing. Exception may be taken to my own suggestion as to the effect of Wuthering Heights on Charlotte Brontë's genius. If anybody likes to fling it on the rubbish heap they may. I may have theorized a little too much in laying stress on the supernatural element in Wuthering Heights. It is because M. Dimnet has insisted too much on its brutality. I may have exaggerated Emily Brontë's "mysticism". It is because her "paganism" has been too much in evidence. It may be said that I have no more authority for my belief that Emily Brontë was in love with the Absolute than other people have for theirs, that Charlotte was in love with M. Héger.

Finally, much that I have said about Emily Brontë's hitherto unpublished poems is pure theory. But it is theory, I think, that careful examination of the poems will make good. I may have here and there given as a "Gondal" poem what is not a "Gondal" poem at all. Still, I believe, it will be admitted that it is in the cycle of these poems, and not elsewhere, that we should look for the first germs of Wuthering Heights. The evidence only demonstrates in detail—what has never been seriously contested—that the genius of Emily Brontë found its sources in itself.

10th October, 1911.

The Three Brontës

It is impossible to write of the three Brontës and forget the place they lived in, the black-grey, naked village, bristling like a rampart on the clean edge of the moor; the street, dark and steep as a gully, climbing the hill to the Parsonage at the top; the small oblong house, naked and grey, hemmed in on two sides by the graveyard, its five windows flush with the wall, staring at the graveyard where the tombstones, grey and naked, are set so close that the grass hardly grows between. The church itself is a burying ground; its walls are tombstones, and its floor roofs the forgotten and the unforgotten dead.

A low wall and a few feet of barren garden divide the Parsonage from the graveyard, a few feet between the door of the house and the door in the wall where its dead were carried through. But a path leads beyond the graveyard to "a little and a lone green lane", Emily Brontë's lane that leads to the open moors.

It is the genius of the Brontës that made their place immortal; but it is the soul of the place that made their genius what it is. You cannot exaggerate its importance. They drank and were saturated with Haworth. When they left it they hungered and thirsted for it; they sickened till the hour of their return. They gave themselves to it with passion, and their works ring with the shock and interchange of two immortalities. Haworth is saturated with them. Their souls are henceforth no more to be disentangled from its soul than their bodies from its earth. All their poetry, their passion and their joy is there, in this place of their tragedy, visible, palpable, narrow as the grave and boundless.

In the year eighteen-twenty the Reverend Patrick Brontë and his wife Maria brought their six children, Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily, and Anne, from Thornton, where they were born, to Haworth. Mr. Brontë was an Irishman, a village schoolmaster who won, marvellously, a scholarship that admitted him to Cambridge and the Church of England. Tales have been told of his fathers and his forefathers, peasants and peasant farmers of Ballynaskeagh in County Down. They seem to have been notorious for their energy, eccentricity, imagination, and a certain tendency to turbulence and excess. Tales have been told of Mr. Brontë himself, of his temper, his egotism, his selfishness, his fits of morose or savage temper. The Brontës' biographers, from Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux[A] to Mr. Birrell, have all been hard on this poor and unhappy and innocent old man. It is not easy to see him very clearly through the multitude of tales they tell: how he cut up his wife's silk gown in a fit of passion; how he fired off pistols in a series of fits of passion; how, in still gloomier and more malignant fits, he used to go for long solitary walks. And when you look into the matter you find that the silk gown was, after all, a cotton one, and that he only cut the sleeves out, and then walked into Keighley and brought a silk gown back with him instead; that when he was a young man at Drumballyroney he practised pistol firing, not as a safety valve for temper but as a manly sport, and that as a manly sport he kept it up. As for solitary walks, there is really no reason why a father should not take them; and if Mr. Brontë had insisted on accompanying Charlotte and Emily in their walks, his conduct would have been censured just the same, and, I think, with considerably more reason. As it happened, Mr. Brontë, rather more than most fathers, made companions of his children when they were little. This is not quite the same thing as making himself a companion for them, and the result was a terrific outburst of infant precocity; but this hardly justifies Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux. They seem to have thought that they were somehow appeasing the outraged spirits of Emily and Charlotte by blackening their father and their brother; whereas, if anything could give pain to Charlotte and Emily and innocent Anne in heaven, it would be the knowledge of what Mrs. Gaskell and Madame Duclaux have done for them.

[Footnote A: A. Mary F. Robinson.]

There was injustice in all that zeal as well as indiscretion, for Mr. Brontë had his good points as fathers go. Think what the fathers of the Victorian era could be, and what its evangelical parsons often were; and remember that Mr. Brontë was an evangelical parson, and the father of Emily and Charlotte, not of a brood of gentle, immaculate Jane Austens, and that he was confronted suddenly and without a moment's warning with Charlotte's fame. Why, the average evangelical parson would have been shocked into apoplexy at the idea of any child of his producing Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre. Charlotte's fame would have looked to him exceedingly like infamy. We know what Charles Kingsley, the least evangelical of parsons, once thought of Charlotte. And we know what Mr. Brontë thought of her. He was profoundly proud of his daughter's genius; there is no record and no rumour of any criticism on his part, of any remonstrance or amazement. He was loyal to Charlotte to the last days of his life, when he gave her defence into Mrs. Gaskell's hands; for which confidence Mrs. Gaskell repaid him shockingly.

But he was the kind of figure that is irresistible to the caustic or humorous biographer. There was something impotently fiery in him, as if the genius of Charlotte and Emily had flicked him in irony as it passed him by. He wound himself in yards and yards and yards of white cravat, and he wrote a revolutionary poem called "Vision of Hell". It is easy to make fun of his poems, but they were no worse, or very little worse, than his son Branwell's, so that he may be pardoned if he thought himself more important than his children. Many fathers of the Victorian era did.

And he was important as a temporary vehicle of the wandering creative impulse. It struggled and strove in him and passed from him, choked in yards and yards of white cravat, to struggle and strive again in Branwell and in Anne. As a rule the genius of the race is hostile to the creative impulse, and the creative impulse is lucky if it can pierce through to one member of a family. In the Brontës it emerges at five different levels, rising from abortive struggle to supreme achievement—from Mr. Brontë to his son Branwell, from Branwell to Anne, from Anne to Charlotte, and from Charlotte to Emily. And Maria, who died, was an infant prodigy.

And Mr. Brontë is important because he was the tool used by their destiny to keep Charlotte and Emily in Haworth.

The tragedy we are too apt to call their destiny began with their babyhood, when the mother and six children were brought to Haworth Parsonage and the prospect of the tombstones. They had not been there eighteen months before the mother sickened and died horribly of cancer.

She had to be isolated as far as possible. The Parsonage house was not large, and it was built with an extreme and straight simplicity; two front rooms, not large, right and left of the narrow stone-flagged passage, a bedroom above each, and between, squeezed into the small spare space above the passage, a third room, no bigger than a closet and without a fireplace. This third room is important in the story of the Brontës, for, when their mother's illness declared itself, it was in this incredibly small and insufferably unwholesome den that the five little girls were packed, heaven knows how, and it was here that the seeds of tuberculosis were sown in their fragile bodies. After their mother's death the little fatal room was known as the children's study (you can see, in a dreadful vision, the six pale little faces, pressed together, looking out of the window on to the graves below). It was used again as a night-nursery, and later still as the sleeping-place shared by two, if not three, of the sisters, two of whom were tuberculous.

The mother died and was buried in a vault under the floor of the church, not far from the windows of her house. Her sister, Miss Branwell, came up from Penzance to look after the children. You can see this small, middle-aged, early Victorian spinster, exiled for ever from the sunshine of the town she loved, dragging out her sad, fastidious life in a cold and comparatively savage country that she unspeakably disliked. She took possession of the room her sister died in (it was the most cheerful room in the house), and lived in it. Her nieces had to sit there with her for certain hours while she taught them sewing and all the early Victorian virtues. Their father made himself responsible for the rest of their education, which he conducted with considerable vigour and originality. Maria, the eldest, was the child of promise. Long before Maria was eleven he "conversed" with her on "the leading topics of the day, with as much pleasure and freedom as with any grown-up person".

For this man, so gloomy, we are told, and so morose, found pleasure in taking his tiny children out on to the moors, where he entertained them alternately with politics and tales of brutality and horror. At six years old each little Brontë had its view of the political situation; and it was not until a plague of measles and whooping-cough found out their tender youth that their father realized how very young and small and delicate they were, and how very little, after all, he understood about a nursery. In a sudden frantic distrust of the climate of Haworth, of Miss Branwell, and his own system, he made up his mind to send Maria and Elizabeth and Charlotte and Emily to school.

And there was only one school within his means, the Clergy Daughters' School, established at Cowan Bridge in an unwholesome valley. It has been immortalized in Jane Eyre, together with its founder and patron, the Reverend Carus Wilson. There can be no doubt that the early Victorian virtues, self-repression, humility, and patience under affliction, were admirably taught at Cowan Bridge. And if the carnal nature of the Clergy Daughters resisted the militant efforts of Mr. Carus Wilson, it was ultimately subdued by low diet and primitive drainage working together in an unwholesome valley. Mr. Carus Wilson, indeed, was inspired by a sublime antagonism to the claims of the perishable body; but he seems to have pushed his campaign against the flesh a bit too far, and was surprised at his own success when, one after another, the extremely perishable bodies of those children were laid low by typhus.

The fever did not touch the four little Brontës. They had another destiny. Their seed of dissolution was sown in that small stifling room at Haworth, and was reaped now at Cowan Bridge. First Maria, then Elizabeth, sickened, and was sent home to die. Charlotte stayed on for a while with Emily. She ran wild, and hung about the river, watching it, and dabbling her feet and hands in the running water. Their doom waited for Charlotte and for Emily.

There is no record of Elizabeth except that, like Anne Brontë, she was "gentle". But Maria lived in Charlotte's passionate memory, and will live for ever as Helen Burns, the school-fellow of Jane Eyre. Of those five infant prodigies, she was the most prodigious. She was the first of the children to go down into the vault under Haworth Church; you see her looking back on her sad way, a small, reluctant ghost, lovely, infantile, and yet maternal. Under her name on the flat tombstone a verse stands, premonitory, prophetic, calling to her kindred: "Be ye also ready."

Charlotte was nine years old when her sisters died. Tragedy tells at nine years old. It lived all her life in her fine nerves, reinforced by shock after shock of terror and of anguish.

But for the next seven years, spent at the Parsonage without a break, tragedy was quiescent. Day after day, year after year passed, and nothing happened. And the children of the Parsonage, thrown on themselves and on each other, were exuberantly happy. They had the freedom of the moors, and of the worlds, as wild, as gorgeous, as lonely, as immeasurable, which they themselves created. They found out that they were not obliged to be the children of the Parsonage; they could be, and they were, anything they chose, from the Duke of Wellington down to citizens of Verdopolis. For a considerable number of years they were the "Islanders". "It was in 1827" (Charlotte, at thirteen, records the date with gravity—it was so important) "that our plays were established: Young Men, June 1826; Our Fellows, July 1827; The Islanders, December 1827. These are our three great plays that are not kept secret."

But there were secret plays, Emily's and Charlotte's; and these you gather to be the shy and solitary flights of Emily's and Charlotte's genius. They seem to have required absolutely no impulsion from without. The difficult thing for these small children was to stop writing. Their fire consumed them, and left their bodies ashen white, fragile as ashes. And yet they were not, they could not have been, the sedentary, unwholesome little creatures they might seem to be. The girls were kept hard at work with their thin arms, brushing carpets, dusting furniture, and making beds. And for play they tramped the moors with their brother; they breasted the keen and stormy weather; the sun, the moon, the stars, and the winds knew them; and it is of these fierce, radiant, elemental things that Charlotte and Emily wrote as no women before them had ever written. Conceive the vitality and energy implied in such a life; and think, if you can, of these two as puny, myopic victims of the lust of literature. It was from the impressions they took in those seven years that their immortality was made.

And then, for a year and a half, Charlotte went to school again, that school of Miss Wooler's at Roe Head, where Ellen Nussey found her, "a silent, weeping, dark little figure in the large bay-window". She was then sixteen.

Two years later she went back to Miss Wooler's school as a teacher.

In the register of the Clergy Daughters' School there are two immortal entries:

"Charlotte Brontë…. Left school, June 1st, 1825—Governess."

"Emily Brontë…. Left, June 1st, 1825. Subsequent career—Governess."

They did not question the arrangement. They were not aware of any other destiny. They never doubted that the boy, Branwell, was the child of promise, who was to have a glorious career. In order that he should have it the sisters left Haworth again and again, forcing themselves to the exile that destroyed them, and the work they hated. It was Charlotte and Anne who showed themselves most courageous and determined in the terrible adventure; Emily, who was courage and determination incarnate, failed. Homesickness had become a disease with them, an obsession, almost a madness. They longed with an immitigable longing for their Parsonage-house, their graveyard, and their moors. Emily was consumed by it; Anne languished; Charlotte was torn between it and her passion for knowledge.

She took Emily back with her to Roe Head as a pupil, and Emily nearly died of it. She sent Emily home, and little Anne, the last victim, took Emily's place. She and Charlotte went with the school when it was removed to Dewsbury Moor. Then Emily, who had nearly died of Roe Head, shamed by Charlotte's and Anne's example, went to Halifax as a teacher in Miss Patchett's Academy for Young Ladies. She was at Halifax—Halifax of all places—for six months, and nearly died of Halifax. And after that Charlotte and Anne set out on their careers as nursery-governesses.

It was all that they considered themselves fit for. Anne went to a Mrs. Ingham at Blake Hall, where she was homesick and miserable. Charlotte went to the Sidgwicks at Stonegappe near Skipton, where "one of the pleasantest afternoons I spent—indeed, the only one at all pleasant—was when Mr. Sidgwick walked out with his children, and I had orders to follow a little way behind". You have an impression of years of suffering endured at Stonegappe. As a matter of fact, Charlotte was there hardly three months—May, June, July, eighteen-thirty-nine.

And most of the time their brother Branwell was either at Bradford or at Haworth, dreaming of greatness, and drinking at the "Black Bull". The "Black Bull" stands disastrously near to the Parsonage, at the corner of the churchyard, with its parlour windows looking on the graves. Branwell was the life and soul of every party of commercial travellers that gathered there. Conviviality took strange forms at Haworth. It had a Masonic Lodge of the Three Graces, with John Brown, the grave-digger, for Worshipful Master. Branwell was at one and the same time secretary to the Three Graces and to the Haworth Temperance Society. When he was not entertaining bagmen, he was either at Bradford painting bad portraits, or at Haworth pouring out verses, fearfully long, fatally fluent verses, and writing hysterical letters to the editor of Blackwood's Magazine.

One formidable letter (the third he sent) is headed in large letters: "Sir, read what I write." It begins: "And would to Heaven you would believe in me, for then you would attend to me and act upon it", and ends: "You lost an able writer in James Hogg, and God grant you may get one in Patrick Branwell Brontë." Another followed, headed: "Sir, read now at last", and ending, "Condemn not unheard". In a final letter Branwell inquires whether Mr. Blackwood thinks his magazine "so perfect that no addition to its power would be either possible or desirable", and whether it is pride that actuates him, or custom, or prejudice, and conjures him: "Be a man, sir!"

Nothing came of it. Mr. Blackwood refused to be a man.

Yet Branwell had his chance. He went to London, but nothing came of it. He went to Bradford and had a studio there, but nothing came of it. He lived for a brief period in a small provincial Bohemia. It was his best and happiest period, but nothing came of it beyond the letters and the reams of verse he sent to Leyland the sculptor. There was something brilliant and fantastic about the boy that fascinated Leyland. But a studio costs money, and Branwell had to give his up and go back to Haworth and the society of John Brown the stone-mason and grave-digger. That John Brown was a decent fellow you gather from the fact that on a journey to Liverpool he had charge of Branwell, when Branwell was at his worst. They had affectionate names for each other. Branwell is the Philosopher, John Brown is the Old Knave of Trumps. The whole trouble with Branwell was that he could not resist the temptation of impressing the grave-digger. He himself was impressed by the ironic union in the Worshipful Master of conviviality and a sinister occupation.

A letter of Branwell's (preserved by the grave-digger in a quaint devotion to his friend's memory) has achieved an immortality denied to his "Effusions". Nothing having come of the "Effusions", Branwell, to his infinite credit, followed his sisters' example, and became tutor with a Mr. Postlethwaite. The irony of his situation pleased him, and he wrote to the Old Knave of Trumps thus: "I took a half-year's farewell of old friend whisky at Kendal on the night after I left. There was a party of gentlemen at the Royal Hotel, and I joined them. We ordered in supper and whisky-toddy as hot as hell! They thought I was a physician, and put me in the chair. I gave several toasts that were washed down at the same time till the room spun round and the candles danced in our eyes…. I found myself in bed next morning with a bottle of porter, a glass, and a corkscrew beside me. Since then I have not tasted anything stronger than milk-and-water, nor, I hope, shall, till I return at midsummer; when we will see about it. I am getting as fat as Prince William at Springhead, and as godly as his friend Parson Winterbotham. My hand shakes no longer. I ride to the banker's at Ulverston with Mr. Postlethwaite, and sit drinking tea, and talking scandal with old ladies. As for the young ones! I have one sitting by me just now—fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-haired, sweet eighteen—she little thinks the devil is so near her!"—and a great deal more in the same silly, post-Byronic strain.

In his postscript Branwell says: "Of course you won't show this letter", and of course John Brown showed it all round. It was far too good to be kept to himself; John Brown's brother thought it so excellent that he committed it to memory. This was hard on Branwell. The letter is too fantastic to be used against him as evidence of his extreme depravity, but it certainly lends some support to Mrs. Gaskell's statements that he had begun already, at two-and-twenty, to be an anxiety to his family. Haworth, that schooled his sisters to a high and beautiful austerity, was bad for Branwell.

He stayed with Mr. Postlethwaite for a month longer than Charlotte stayed with the Sidgwicks.

Then, for a whole year, Charlotte was at Haworth, doing housemaid's work, and writing poems, and amusing herself at the expense of her father's curates. She had begun to find out the extent to which she could amuse herself. She also had had "her chance". She had refused two offers of marriage, preferring the bondage and the exile that she knew. Nothing more exhilarating than a proposal that you have rejected. Those proposals did Charlotte good. But it was not marriage that she wanted. She found it (for a year) happiness enough to be at Haworth, to watch the long comedy of the curates as it unrolled itself before her. She saw most things that summer (her twenty-fifth) with the ironic eyes of the comic spirit, even Branwell. She wrote to Miss Nussey: "A distant relation of mine, one Patrick Boanerges, has set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering, knight-errant-like capacity of clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railroad." And she goes on to chaff Miss Nussey about Celia Amelia, the curate. "I know Mrs. Ellen is burning with eagerness to hear something about W. Weightman, whom she adores in her heart, and whose image she cannot efface from her memory."

Some of her critics, including Mrs. Oliphant (far less indulgent than the poor curates who forgave her nobly), have grudged Charlotte her amusement. There is nothing, from her fame downwards, that Mrs. Oliphant did not grudge her. Mr. Birrell sternly disapproves; even Mr. Swinburne, at the height of his panegyric, is put off. Perhaps Charlotte's humour was not her most attractive quality; but nobody seems to have seen the pathos and the bravery of it. Neither have they seen that Miss Nussey was at the bottom of its worst development, the "curate-baiting". Miss Nussey used to go and stay at Haworth for weeks at a time. Haworth was not amusing, and Miss Nussey had to be amused. All this school-girlish jesting, the perpetual and rather tiresome banter, was a playing down to Miss Nussey. It was a kind of tender "baiting" of Miss Nussey, who had tried on several occasions to do Charlotte good. And it was the natural, healthy rebound of the little Irish gamine that lived in Charlotte Brontë, bursting with cleverness and devilry. I, for my part, am glad to think that for one happy year she gave it full vent.

She was only twenty-four. Even as late as the mid-Victorian era to be twenty-four and unmarried was to be middle-aged. But (this cannot be too much insisted on) Charlotte Brontë was the revolutionist who changed all that. She changed it not only in her novels but in her person. Here again she has been misrepresented. There are no words severe enough for Mrs. Oliphant's horrible portrait of her as a plain-faced, lachrymose, middle-aged spinster, dying, visibly, to be married, obsessed for ever with that idea, for ever whining over the frustration of her sex. What Mrs. Oliphant, "the married woman", resented in Charlotte Brontë, over and above her fame, was Charlotte's unsanctioned knowledge of the mysteries, her intrusion into the veiled places, her unbaring of the virgin heart. That her genius was chiefly concerned in it does not seem to have occurred to Mrs. Oliphant, any more than it occurred to her to notice the impression that Charlotte Brontë made on her male contemporaries. It is doubtful if one of them thought of her as Mrs. Oliphant would have us think. They gave her the tender, deferent affection they would have given to a charming child. Even the very curates saw in her, to their amazement, the spirit of undying youth. Small as a child, and fragile, with soft hair and flaming eyes, and always the pathetic, appealing plainness of a plain child, with her child's audacity and shyness, her sudden, absurd sallies and retreats, she had a charm made the more piquant by her assumption of austerity. George Henry Lewes was gross and flippant, and he could not see it; Branwell's friend, Mr. Grundy, was Branwell's friend, and he missed it. Mrs. Oliphant ranges herself with Mr. Grundy and George Henry Lewes.

But Charlotte's fun was soon over, and she became a nursery-governess again at Mrs. White's, of Rawdon. Anne was with Mrs. Robinson, at Thorp Green.

Emily was at Haworth, alone.

That was in eighteen-forty-one. Years after their death a little black box was found, containing four tiny scraps of paper, undiscovered by Charlotte when she burnt every line left by Anne and Emily except their poems. Two of these four papers were written by Emily, and two by Anne; each sister keeping for the other a record of four years. They begin in eighteen-forty-one. Emily was then twenty-four and Anne a year and a half younger. Nothing can be more childlike, more naïve. Emily heads her diary:

A PAPER to be opened when Anne is 25 years old, or my next birthday after if all be well. Emily Jane Brontë. July the 30th, 1841.

She says: "It is Friday evening, near nine o'clock—wild rainy weather. I am seated in the dining-room, having just concluded tidying our desk-boxes, writing this document. Papa is in the parlour—Aunt upstairs in her room…. Victoria and Adelaide are ensconced in the peat-house. Keeper is in the kitchen—Hero in his cage."

Having accounted for Victoria and Adelaide, the tame geese, Keeper, the dog, and Hero, the hawk, she notes the whereabouts of Charlotte, Branwell, and Anne. And then (with gravity):

"A scheme is at present in agitation for setting us up in a school of our own."… "This day four years I wonder whether we shall be dragging on in our present condition or established to our hearts' content."

Then Emily dreams her dream.

"I guess that on the time appointed for the opening of this paper we, i.e. Charlotte, Anne, and I, shall be all merrily seated in our own sitting-room in some pleasant and flourishing seminary, having just gathered in for the midsummer holiday. Our debts will be paid off and we shall have cash in hand to a considerable amount. Papa, Aunt, and Branwell, will either have been or be coming to visit us."

And Anne writes with equal innocence (it is delicious, Anne's diary): "Four years ago I was at school. Since then I have been a governess at Blake Hall, left it, come to Thorp Green, and seen the sea and York Minster."… "We have got Keeper, got a sweet little cat and lost it, and also got a hawk. Got a wild goose which has flown away, and three tame ones, one of which has been killed."

It is Emily who lets out the dreary secret of the dream—the debts which could not be paid; probably Branwell's.

But the "considerable amount of cash in hand" was to remain a dream. Nothing came of Branwell's knight-errantry. He muddled the accounts of the Leeds and Manchester Railroad and was sent home. It was not good for Branwell to be a clerk at a lonely wayside station. His disaster, which they much exaggerated, was a shock to the three sisters. They began to have misgivings, premonitions of Branwell's destiny.

And from Mrs. White's at Rawdon, Charlotte sends out cry after desolate cry. Again we have an impression of an age of exile, but really the exile did not last long, not much longer than Emily's imprisonment in the Academy for Young Ladies, nothing like so long as Anne's miserable term.

The exile really began in 'forty-two, when Charlotte and Emily left England for Brussels and Madame Héger's Pensionnat de Demoiselles in the Rue d'Isabelle. It is supposed to have been the turning-point in Charlotte's career. She was then twenty-six, Emily twenty-four.

It is absurd and it is pathetic, but Charlotte's supreme ambition at that time was to keep a school, a school of her own, like her friend Miss Wooler. There was a great innocence and humility in Charlotte. She was easily taken in by any of those veiled, inimical spectres of the cross-roads that youth mistakes for destiny. She must have refused to look too closely at the apparition; it was enough for her that she saw in it the divine thing—liberty. Her genius was already struggling in her. She had begun to feel under her shoulders the painful piercing of her wings. Her friend, Mary Taylor, had written to her from Brussels telling her of pictures and cathedrals. Charlotte tells how it woke her up. "I hardly know what swelled in my breast as I read her letter: such a vehement impatience of restraint and steady work; such a strong wish for wings—wings such as wealth can furnish; such an urgent desire to see, to know, to learn; something internal seemed to expand bodily for a minute. I was tantalized by the consciousness of faculties unexercised." But Charlotte's "wings" were not "such as wealth can furnish". They were to droop, almost to die, in Brussels.

Emily was calmer. Whether she mistook it for her destiny or not, she seems to have acquiesced when Charlotte showed her the veiled figure at the cross-roads, to have been led blindfold by Charlotte through the "streaming and starless darkness" that took them to Brussels. The rest she endured with a stern and terrible resignation. It is known from her letters what the Pensionnat was to Charlotte. Heaven only knows what it must have been to Emily. Charlotte, with her undying passion for knowledge and the spectacle of the world, with her psychological interest in M. Héger and his wife, Charlotte hardly came out of it with her soul alive. But Emily was not interested in M. Héger nor in his wife, nor in his educational system. She thought his system was no good and told him so. What she thought of his wife is not recorded.

Then, in their first year of Brussels, their old aunt, Miss Branwell, died. That was destiny, the destiny that was so kind to Emily. It sent her and her sister back to Haworth and it kept her there. Poor Anne was fairly launched on her career; she remained in her "situation", and somebody had to look after Mr. Brontë and the house. Things were going badly and sadly at the Parsonage. Branwell was there, drinking; and Charlotte was even afraid that her father … also sometimes … perhaps….

She left Emily to deal with them and went back to Brussels as a pupil teacher, alone. She went in an agony of self-reproach, desiring more and more knowledge, a perfect, inalienable, indestructible possession of the German language, and wondering whether it were right to satisfy that indomitable craving. By giving utterance to this self-reproach, so passionate, so immense, so disproportioned to the crime, the innocent Charlotte laid herself open to an unjust suspicion. Innocent and unaware she went, and—it is her own word—she was "punished" for it.

Nothing that she had yet known of homesickness could compare with that last year of solitary and unmitigated exile. It is supposed, even by the charitable, that whatever M. Héger did or did not do for Charlotte, he did everything for her genius. As a matter of fact, it was at Brussels that she suffered the supreme and ultimate abandonment. She no longer felt the wild unknown thing stirring in her with wings. So little could M. Héger do for it that it refused to inhabit the same house with him. She records the result of that imprisonment a few weeks after her release: "There are times now when it appears to me as if all my ideas and feelings, except a few friendships and affections, are changed from what they used to be; something in me, which used to be enthusiasm, is tamed down and broken."

At Brussels surely enlightenment must have come to her. She must have seen, as Emily saw, that in going that way, she had mistaken and done violence to her destiny.

She went back to Haworth where it waited for her, where it had turned even the tragedy of her family to account. Everything conspired to keep her there. The school was given up. She tells why. "It is on Papa's account; he is now, as you know, getting old, and it grieves me to tell you that he is losing his sight. I have felt for some months that I ought not to be away from him; and I feel now that it would be too selfish to leave (at least as long as Branwell and Anne are absent) to pursue selfish interests of my own. With the help of God I will try to deny myself in this matter, and to wait."

And with the help of God she waited.